Recently Published Reviews

Great Altarpieces: Gothic and Renaissance is one of the latest additions to the new wave of scholarship on the altarpiece as a genre. The last two decades of the twentieth century were marked by an increasing pace of publications on altarpieces—which had not been studied as such since the late nineteenth century, when Jacob Burckhardt wrote an article called “Das Altarbild.” Recently a number of monographs on altarpieces of various regions have appeared, including: Henk van Os, Sienese Altarpieces, 1215–1460: Form, Content, Function; Peter Humfrey, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice; Judith Berg Sobré, Behind the Altar Table: The… Full Review

The mundane word “clothes” in the title of Linda Baumgarten’s new book underscores one of her principal aims: to reconstruct lives from garments that only become “costume” when they enter museums. The longtime curator of textiles and costumes at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Baumgarten mines the institution’s extensive and varied collection of clothing, acquired over the last seven decades, initially to “accessorize the buildings” in the “Williamsburg Restoration” (as the historic site was first called) but eventually to display them as objects of interest in their own right. Through meticulous attention to textile types and sources, manufacture, and alteration or… Full Review

In the words of its editor, Byzantine Women and Their World “stands as the permanent document of the temporary display at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum” (9). Given the exhibition’s title and the gender of the catalogue’s six main contributors, one might suppose that feminism, not to speak of other critical theories of the twentieth century, had broadly penetrated the study of Byzantine art in this country. One would be largely wrong. Like the traditional Hegelian division of Byzantine history into three periods—Early, Middle, and Late—there have essentially been three successive phases of feminist art… Full Review

Gillian Mackie has written an ambitious study of the early Christian chapel with a focus on the regions of Italy and Istria in the fourth to seventh centuries. Impressive in its breadth of coverage and depth of research, Early Christian Chapels in the West: Decoration, Function, and Patronage should become one of the primary resources for any reader interested in the development of art during this period. This well-illustrated book presents a typological and historical analysis of the early Christian chapel in its various manifestations (part 1) and a series of in-depth case studies of surviving examples (part 2). The… Full Review

In the last two decades the study of nineteenth-century American painting has enjoyed a renaissance of sorts. The same cannot be said, however, for the vast realm of nineteenth-century visual culture: the popular prints, book and magazine illustration, pictorial journalism, and ephemera that proliferated throughout the century and became increasingly important agents in the dissemination of news, information, and ideologies. For many ordinary Americans, pictures in books and newspapers had a far greater impact on understanding current events than contemporaneous paintings ever would. Yet, with relatively few exceptions, the “higher” art of painting has continued to occupy a privileged place… Full Review

The 1990s were an exciting period for those concerned with gender issues in Italian Renaissance art. Seemingly overnight, a group of scholars emerged determined to track down how, when, where, and why women created, commissioned, and utilized works of art. Such scholarship provided access to a world in which Renaissance women were seen to have a greater measure of the autonomy history has traditionally denied them. They became subjects, not objects, and evolved beyond the limited glance-and-gaze theory that dominated feminist scholarship of the 1980s. Moreover, the large number of symposia and conference sessions convened to examine this subject across… Full Review

As the subject of a monograph, the American genre painter Richard Caton Woodville (1825–1855) presents some clear challenges. His life was regrettably short (he died of a morphine overdose at age thirty), his few years of work were not overly prolific (we know of perhaps seven major paintings), his decision to live in Europe for his entire career placed him culturally and physically outside the ranks of his fellow antebellum artists, and, as if to frustrate the historian’s attempt to compensate for these limitations, he left behind almost no personal papers. Moreover, Woodville’s art does not fit into the accustomed… Full Review

Debra Schafter’s book contributes to a small but growing literature committed to identifying intersections of, rather than differences between, ornament and modernism. The stakes of this endeavor should not be underestimated. One needs only to remember Adolf Loos’s proclamation that “the evolution of humanity would cause ornament to disappear from functional objects,” in his polemic from 1908, aptly titled “Ornament and Crime,” to grasp the significance of this turnaround in aesthetic categorization and judgment. Hal Foster, who plays on Loos’s title for his own recent book, Design and Crime (London: Verso, 2002), summarizes the traditional understanding… Full Review

See Mikiko Hirayama’s review of this book From its beginnings, photography has been the agent of an international dialogue of its own making. It has enacted and exemplified tensions between local cultures and wider historical energies: those of colonialist assimilation and resistance, of commercial engagement, of transcultural communication. Study of the medium leads quickly and irresistibly to international issues. Therefore few approaches to it have proven as prone to schematic rigidity as surveys of what might be called—to adopt the wishful old Stalinist phrase for realizing “socialism” within national borders—Photography in One Country. Whether extrapolated to fill out… Full Review

Art history has now and then been structured around psychoanalytic theory and method of inquiry. Clinical method and therapy have often been relied upon to interpret paintings as well. Nevertheless, the two modes of inquiry, historical and therapeutic, have been wary of each other’s conclusions, and therefore a relationship that varies from outright antagonism to interdisciplinary merger has characterized their past. That history is usually thought to begin with Sigmund Freud’s studies of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and brief references to other artists. As a matter of fact, the psychological interpretation of painting goes much further back, to Pliny the… Full Review

The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance is an ambitious book, a prolonged meditation on the reflexive nature of portraiture. It constitutes a novel contribution to the history of Renaissance portraiture in that Jodi Cranston seeks to bring modern literary criticism and concepts to bear in her discussion of sixteenth-century Venetian and northern Italian likenesses. Stating that “thinking of pictures in terms of analogous structures characterized the general approach” (7) of Renaissance artists and patrons, she suggests parallels between the structural relationship of sitter and viewer and the rhetorical structures—as distinct from the content—of certain Renaissance literary forms. The… Full Review

In Japan, little formal distinction existed between the fine and decorative arts until about a century ago, when the Japanese began to adopt Western art-historical language and structures. Before then, all works of art—painting, ceramics, sculpture, and textiles—were seen as playing an equally vital role in the embellishment of interior and exterior spaces and as setting the aesthetic tone of a specific locale. The careful choice of the painting to be displayed in the tokonoma, the floral arrangement in a particular vase, or the design on a kimono could work together to create a mood of austerity or luxury,… Full Review

The large retrospective devoted to the work of Marsden Hartley, organized by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser for the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, is a delight, a sadness, and a puzzle in nearly equal measure. The delight is easy to relate. It was thrilling to walk into the Hartford exhibition’s first gallery and face a wall of Hartley’s brightly colored, nonrepresentational paintings made in Paris and Berlin in 1912 and 1913 (cat. nos. 8–11). Their recognizable motifs—numbers, seated Buddhas, musical staves, mudras, Chinese cloud forms, uniformed horsemen—float across the canvases, divided by dark blue lines that alternatively undulate among or… Full Review

In Image and Relic: Mediating the Sacred in Early Medieval Rome, Erik Thunø thoroughly explores three objects that could be justly deemed among the most important works of art created in the Carolingian period. (One of these is pictured here.) Commissioned as part of what was apparently a coherent papal project of art production in support of the cult of saints and relics, the objects were made for the most prestigious location in all of Western Christendom, the Lateran altar of the Holy of Holies. Nevertheless, these works are now less familiar than they ought to be, not… Full Review

Robert Smithson can be a trap for the critic. So much of what is interesting in his work can only be accessed through his writing, and his ideas are so captivatingly threaded through both that quotation often stands in for interpretation. Most studies of Smithson are just extended glosses and therefore do not tell us anything that we could not find out ourselves by going to the same source. Art history offers two correctives to this state of affairs: close study of the works themselves, and close study of the context within which they were made. These two approaches are… Full Review